So the Gossips are talking about our senior senator from Texas, Kay Bailey Hutchinson. Will she resign her seat or stay in the Senate until her term expires in 2012. We think she will stay. Life as a Senator is not too hard and the pay is fine and besides she can help Texas some more. So we say she stays.
Hispanic names and the GOP
March 6th, 2010It happens every primary election, regardless of the party. Voters go in to vote at the top of the ticket and have no idea who else in running at the bottom of the ticket. So they vote for familiar sounding names or in the case of the Republican primary in some cases voted for the Anglo candidate over the Hispanic candidate. Democrats are also bothered by this routine. Look at Sue Schechter who use to be the Chair of the Democratic Party in Harris County. She lost on Tuesday. Or look at the candidate in District 22 who wants to impeach the Democratic President. She won the nomination over 2 other qualified candidates.
I do think that the Chair of the Railroad Commission, Victor Carrillo has a ligament beef with the Texas Republican Party. He was appointed by Governor Perry and was very well qualified. Yes he lost to someone no one had heard of and who spent no money. An Anglo candidate with a familiar sounding name, Porter.
Here is what the Houston Chronicle said about the loses:
“AUSTIN — Hispanic candidates ran strong in many Republican primary races across Texas this week, but two candidates are blaming their losses on racially polarized voting.
Election returns and political consultants, however, say the losses of Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector Leo Vasquez and Railroad Commissioner Victor Carrillo had more to do with personal issues and poorly run campaigns than ethnicity.
Carrillo’s father and half-brother died last year, and Carrillo underwent surgery for a benign brain tumor, all affecting the time he spent campaigning for re-election. Vasquez lost social conservative support, local Republicans said, because he lives with a woman married to another man.
Carrillo started the ethnic angst with an e-mail to supporters indicating racial bias had cost him re-election. That was followed up by Vasquez’s campaign manager and girlfriend, SuZanne Feather, sending out an e-mail saying there were “many similarities” between Carrillo and Vasquez’s loss on Tuesday to tea party activist Don Sumners. Vasquez joined in during an interview with the Houston Chronicle.
“It is perplexing that someone could basically spend no money whatsoever and mount no campaign and win as handily as he did,” Vasquez said. “The same thing happened in the Victor Carrillo race as well.”
But Vasquez’s predecessor in office, Paul Bettencourt said Vasquez lost because he had issues in his personal life that cost him the support of social conservative organizations.
Consultant Allen Blakemore, speaking for social conservative leader Steve Hotze, said Republicans were upset with Vasquez for settling a voter-registration lawsuit with Democrats and for not being as vocal on property tax increases as Bettencourt. Blakemore said the “final blow” came when social conservative leaders learned Vasquez lives with a woman married to another man.
Vasquez admitted social conservative leaders Hotze and Terry Lowry “probably got him (Sumners) another 10,000 votes and maybe even made the full difference between us.”
“The Republican Party, especially in Harris County, has been, unfortunately, overly controlled and influenced by a small, but vocal group on the religious right, and we need to get back to the core principles of fiscal conservative issues rather than these social issues that are being perpetuated by that small, but vocal, minority,” Vasquez said.
He refused to discuss whether his personal life made a difference. He and Feather said they have had a relationship for a decade.
“Our relationship never seemed to be an issue while we were out writing the checks and putting up the signs and doing other grass-roots work for the Republican Party,” Vasquez said.
Carrillo, who won the 2004 Republican nomination by defeating an Anglo in a runoff, stunned many Republicans by putting out an e-mail blaming his loss Tuesday to a little-known opponent, David Porter, on racially biased voting.
“Early polling showed that the typical GOP primary voter has very little info about the position of Railroad Commissioner, what we do, or who my opponent or I were,” Carrillo said in an e-mail to supporters. “Given the choice between “Porter” and “Carrillo” — unfortunately, the Hispanic-surname was a serious setback from which I could never recover although I did all in my power to overcome this built-in bias.”
Outreach efforts
Republicans have been trying to reach out to Hispanic voters in recent years, but they have been hurt by anti-immigration rhetoric that some take to be anti-Hispanic sentiments. Carrillo’s statement likely will fuel that fire.
Election returns from Tuesday’s voting show Carrillo lost not only statewide but also in traditionally Hispanic counties, such as Hidalgo and Cameron.
In the Supreme Court Place 9 race, down the ballot from the Railroad Commission race, there were more than 1.1 million ballots cast in a race that gave Eva Guzman the nomination over Rose Vela — meaning at least some of the voters who cast ballots for Porter also voted for one of the Hispanic women.
Republican consultant Ted Delisi said Carrillo spent far less than Railroad Commissioners Elizabeth Ames Jones or Michael Williams did on their re-election campaigns and said Carrillo did little personal campaigning.
“In the end, a bad campaign is just a bad campaign,” Delisi said”.
r.g.ratcliffe@chron.com
chris.moran@chron.com
Hispanic names and the GOP
March 6th, 2010AUSTIN — Hispanic candidates ran strong in many Republican primary races across Texas this week, but two candidates are blaming their losses on racially polarized voting.
Election returns and political consultants, however, say the losses of Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector Leo Vasquez and Railroad Commissioner Victor Carrillo had more to do with personal issues and poorly run campaigns than ethnicity.
Carrillo’s father and half-brother died last year, and Carrillo underwent surgery for a benign brain tumor, all affecting the time he spent campaigning for re-election. Vasquez lost social conservative support, local Republicans said, because he lives with a woman married to another man.
Carrillo started the ethnic angst with an e-mail to supporters indicating racial bias had cost him re-election. That was followed up by Vasquez’s campaign manager and girlfriend, SuZanne Feather, sending out an e-mail saying there were “many similarities” between Carrillo and Vasquez’s loss on Tuesday to tea party activist Don Sumners. Vasquez joined in during an interview with the Houston Chronicle.
“It is perplexing that someone could basically spend no money whatsoever and mount no campaign and win as handily as he did,” Vasquez said. “The same thing happened in the Victor Carrillo race as well.”
But Vasquez’s predecessor in office, Paul Bettencourt said Vasquez lost because he had issues in his personal life that cost him the support of social conservative organizations.
Consultant Allen Blakemore, speaking for social conservative leader Steve Hotze, said Republicans were upset with Vasquez for settling a voter-registration lawsuit with Democrats and for not being as vocal on property tax increases as Bettencourt. Blakemore said the “final blow” came when social conservative leaders learned Vasquez lives with a woman married to another man.
Vasquez admitted social conservative leaders Hotze and Terry Lowry “probably got him (Sumners) another 10,000 votes and maybe even made the full difference between us.”
“The Republican Party, especially in Harris County, has been, unfortunately, overly controlled and influenced by a small, but vocal group on the religious right, and we need to get back to the core principles of fiscal conservative issues rather than these social issues that are being perpetuated by that small, but vocal, minority,” Vasquez said.
He refused to discuss whether his personal life made a difference. He and Feather said they have had a relationship for a decade.
“Our relationship never seemed to be an issue while we were out writing the checks and putting up the signs and doing other grass-roots work for the Republican Party,” Vasquez said.
Carrillo, who won the 2004 Republican nomination by defeating an Anglo in a runoff, stunned many Republicans by putting out an e-mail blaming his loss Tuesday to a little-known opponent, David Porter, on racially biased voting.
“Early polling showed that the typical GOP primary voter has very little info about the position of Railroad Commissioner, what we do, or who my opponent or I were,” Carrillo said in an e-mail to supporters. “Given the choice between “Porter” and “Carrillo” — unfortunately, the Hispanic-surname was a serious setback from which I could never recover although I did all in my power to overcome this built-in bias.”
Outreach efforts
Republicans have been trying to reach out to Hispanic voters in recent years, but they have been hurt by anti-immigration rhetoric that some take to be anti-Hispanic sentiments. Carrillo’s statement likely will fuel that fire.
Election returns from Tuesday’s voting show Carrillo lost not only statewide but also in traditionally Hispanic counties, such as Hidalgo and Cameron.
In the Supreme Court Place 9 race, down the ballot from the Railroad Commission race, there were more than 1.1 million ballots cast in a race that gave Eva Guzman the nomination over Rose Vela — meaning at least some of the voters who cast ballots for Porter also voted for one of the Hispanic women.
Republican consultant Ted Delisi said Carrillo spent far less than Railroad Commissioners Elizabeth Ames Jones or Michael Williams did on their re-election campaigns and said Carrillo did little personal campaigning.
“In the end, a bad campaign is just a bad campaign,” Delisi said.
r.g.ratcliffe@chron.com
chris.moran@chron.com
Charlie Wilson
February 11th, 2010I knew Charlie Wilson for many years, first as a State Senator and then as a Congressman and I liked him very much. He was fun to be around and he knew the ways of the Legislature and the Congress. I use to party with him and spend time in his DC office with Charlies girls, all of whom were smart and good looking. I also knew Joanne King Harring when she was married to Bob Herring, who I worked for.
Charlie was an orginal and I am happy to have known him.
Here is the Houston Chronicle story of his life and death.
“Charlie Wilson, the larger-than-life Texas congressman whose efforts to fund Afghanistan’s resistance to the Soviet Union in the 1980s were made into a movie, died Wednesday of heart failure.
He was 76, and for a little more than two years had been living with a transplanted heart from Houston’s Methodist Hospital.
Old friends said Wilson was most proud of his role in defeating the Soviets in Afghanistan, bringing a Veterans Administration clinic home to Lufkin, and helping to create the Big Thicket National Preserve. But they said he represented more than all of that.
“First he was a wonderfully kind and generous person,” said John Wing, who traveled with Wilson to Afghanistan and Pakistan and remained close to him. “That kindness and generosity extended to everyone, no matter whether they were president of a country or a person down and out and looking for a job. Charlie saw no colors, no difference in people’s worldly standing. He just saw people.”
Wing notes that Wilson represented the 2nd District in East Texas in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1973 through 1996, and that he was always ranked first or second in constituent services.
“And that was a damn good thing because he was not the prototypical East Texan,” said Wing, founder and chairman of Wing Aviation. “There’s not a lot worth recording about his behavior or mine when we were both single.”
Wing says Wilson gave up drinking and womanizing when he fell head over heels for his wife, Barbara. They recently celebrated their 11th wedding anniversary.
Pain and praise Wednesday afternoon, as high-powered politicians sang Wilson’s praises, it was his old friends who sounded deeply pained.
One was Buddy Temple, who knew Wilson since 1964 and was with him when he collapsed.
Wilson was born June 1, 1933, in the small East Texas town of Trinity.
Temple can’t remember exactly how old Wilson was, perhaps 13, when he entered politics.
Wilson himself told the story many times : his beloved dog used to run into a neighbor’s yard, and in retaliation the neighbor, who happened to be a city council incumbent, poisoned the dog.
Wilson ran against the man and won because he ferried so many voters, mostly poor and black, to the polls.
Wilson went on to graduate from the U.S. Naval Academy, then serve as a Navy officer and spend six terms in the Texas Legislature.
Tom Bacon, who spent a year as a legislative and press aide to Wilson shortly after he was first elected, said his boss had a tendency to write his own press releases. That infuriated Bacon, in part because that was his job, in part because Wilson was a poor writer.
Finally, the aide had enough and quit.
“I went storming down into his office ready to fight,” Bacon recalled. “He kept intruding on my job. But when I left, I was drinking whiskey with him. He had the knack of making you like him.”
Wilson was married when he went to Congress in the early ’70s, but that marriage didn’t last long in Washington, where he was surrounded by temptation.
He was known for and hiring gorgeous women in his office who came to be known as Charlie’s Angels.
“Yes, he was a good-time guy and a womanizer,” says Houston attorney Terry O’Rourke, who worked for Wilson in the Texas Senate, then in Congress. “But he was hiring very intelligent women before anybody else, and they were a part of his success.”
Wilson took seriously his constituents but little else until he became involved in Afghanistan. He was convinced that the Communism was going to spread there and beyond unless they were stopped. In the ’80s, he helped channel billions of dollars in American aid to the war effort.
Helped by Houstonian His partner in the effort was Joanne King Herring, a Houston socialite, crusader and staunch anti-communist. During their brief love affair, they lived and breathed the Afghanistan conflict, and the Soviets found themselves outmanned, outgunned and outsmarted.
Detractors say the arms they helped provide the Afghan mujahadeen wound up in the hands of the Taliban government, which was harboring Osama bin Laden at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Wilson and Herring’s relationship died a natural death, but they got back in touch when George Crile wrote a hard-to-believe-but-nonetheless-true account of their adventures, Charlie Wilson’s War.
Tom Hanks played Wilson and Julia Roberts played Herring in the 2007 movie version. The surrounding hoopla put Wilson and Herring back in the limelight.
Wilson loved the book, loved the movie and loved hobnobbing with the Hollywood stars. By then, however, he was recovering from the heart transplant and his activities were limited. He made it to the Los Angeles opening accompanied by not just Barbara and his old friends Wing and Temple, but also his cardiologist and large amounts of medical equipment.
Herring, unencumbered and in excellent health, said, “I would have hated it if Charlie had missed this. This is his moment.”
‘He left us a legacy’ Wednesday evening, a saddened Herring described Wilson as a patriot and dear friend.
“He left us a legacy that we must fulfill,” she said. “We have to rebuild Afghanistan so that the people can maintain themselves and our soldiers can come home. The villagers can do it. We just have to help them with health care and education.”
Wilson actually went to a meeting with his friend Temple on Wednesday morning, and the two men were together when Wilson started to go into cardiopulmonary arrest.
“He was sharp, very sharp at the meeting, but he hadn’t been feeling 100 percent for a while,” Temple said. “We have lost a giant. There won’t be another like him for a while.”
Chronicle reporter Mike Tolson contributed. ”